The reason it has transcoding and works better on NV is that carmack originally had a raytracing server farm running on CUDA when it was all the rage to talk about CUDA and GPGPU. Later he found out it was such a PITA that he went back to x86 core farms. However, by that point they had the transcoding algorithm already done for their server farms and had been working the ins and outs of CUDA NV designs for over a year. Has nothing to do with "we worked better with too long acronym team."

It's amazing he didn't use STREAM. Oh yeah, I forgot that no one does.

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All big name releases have bought review scores. Still getting a 79 after that just shows how bad it actually is. Feel free to enjoy your 79/100 game though.

LOL!

Yes, i'm sure you were under the table when all the bribes were passed!

I do enjoy RAGE, thanks.

BTW- I've even enjoyed games with LOWER scores than 79 on metacritic, also movies and bands the critics don't like. <gasp> (and hated many things the critics do like)

Taste is a pretty subjective thing. A lot of people think Starcraft is the stuff, I played the last one for half an hour and thought "WTF? This is a game?". A lot of people hated Doom3, it was one of my favorite games that year. Etc..

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Could it be the 7000 series is delayed so they can implement Bulldozer design tactics, or due to the use of Bulldozer-like design tactics?

That interview with the ex-AMD engineer on XBit said they switched to the computer aided design (and resulting inefficiencies) so they could have greater synergy with the ATi engineers.

Perhaps the Bulldozer and ATi 7000 are the first efforts of a new computer aided design strategy for all AMD chips.

Quote:

"The management decided there should be such cross-engineering [between AMD and ATI teams within the company] ,which meant we had to stop hand-crafting our CPU designs and switch to an SoC design style. This results in giving up a lot of performance, chip area, and efficiency.

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You're reading it wrong. GPUs have been CADed forever. If you tried to hand-design anything over about 200m transistors you'd spend a decade doing it. The guy is saying they brought GPU techinques to the CPU side. Not to mention, guy sounds like a butthurt fired employee.

I've read that the upcoming AMD GPUs are PCIe 3.0 cards. Does this mean if you install them in current motherboards that only support up to PCIe 2.1, you would be limiting the cards performance wise?

My guess is no. The only benches I've seen lately where the slot was a limiting factor were some quad fire benches on dual 8 vs dual 16 slots. The bandwidth of a PCIe slot isn't close to being saturated AFAIK.

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